My own Twitter "newspaper"

I stumbled across a new site called paper.li that allows anyone to create a "newspaper-style" digital publication from a variety of Twitter feeds. The process takes a few minutes, and offers some interesting prospects.

The tools are in alpha, so things are raw and can change at a moMy customized paper.li "newspaper"ment's notice, so my descriptions are based on what I did today.

There are three options for your publication by:
1) Pulling your feed plus those of the people you follow.
2) Pulling a feed from a designated #hashtag
3) Pulling a feed from a Twitter list

I created two: "The Logan Molen Daily" based on my @lmolen handle and the 253 people I follow and "The journoinnovation Daily," based on Steve Buttry's @journoinnovation list, which pulls in my Tweets.

The paper.li "pagination" process takes a few minutes and creates a publication pulling in posts sorted by topic categories.

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Letting readers influence your cover

Screenshot of an Entertainment Weekly survey page asking for input on possible cover storeisI got an email from Entertainment Weekly (I'm a subscriber) on Tuesday, asking me to share my thoughts on "a couple of possible Entertainment Weekly cover stories." I was asked to "rate your interest in each of these stories," using the simple form shown at the right.

This isn't rocket science and isn't new, but seems to be a trend, as I recently was asked to cast my vote for Sports Illustrated cover prospects.

It'll be interesting to see 1) whether any of these EW covers appears and 2) whether this trend spreads to other magazines. My sense is that it will.

It's interesting that this really hasn't taken off with newspapers. The Wisconsin State Journal appears to have stopped its experiment in letting readers pick one front-page story every day. Many media companies already generate "most popular" story feeds on their websites, and that smart editors take those and other web tools into consideration when gauging reader interest.

I also believe newspaper subscribers really do prefer skilled and experienced editors to make choices on the story mix each day. It's a premium that separates "curated" publications from the 24-7 onslaught of digital news streams.

If you know of other publications giving readers a large say in their cover story selections, lemme know. 

iPad vs. Kindle, tablets and plain old books

I've resisted writing a Kindle vs. IPad post because too many others have done it already, and done it better. But after several comments from friends and co-workers who say they want advice from someone they know, I decided to bang something out. And since I use this site as a testbed, I’ll conduct an experiment at the same time and see what kinds of ads Google delivers to the left of this post.

This advice assumes you're interested in paying the money for a dedicated e-reader. If not, you'll want to stick to physical books or download a Kindle app to your smartphone or desktop. The Kindle apps aren't ideal options for extended reading, but they do in a pinch. And they're free.

OK, now to the e-reader question:

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